Friday, January 30, 2015

I am a strong believer in the theory that with enough will and perseverance, we can achieve most targets. Unfortunately for me, I have either never willed enough or persevered enough for a lot of quests in my life. While I have tried and failed in changing this status quo, I have decided to at least persevere in changing this habit of mine.

For this, one of the primary things that I have decided to target is my time management skills. I have successfully followed times for short durations of time, after which I usually lose my drive. This time over I intend to take it longer. The primary aim is to not lose the drive to improve. I am trying to use some tools like time trackers and time managers for this. It is not an easy job to get into that. I often forget to start or stop my tracker, so the measurements are not accurate. I have not yet created tasks in the time manager because I am not able to understand how to go about it. However, I am getting closer with the tracker. Hopefully, a better tracking measurement will help me with a better time management plan.

Another target I have set is to improve my handwriting. One of the most common comments I have received throughout school was to improve my handwriting. Never tried hard enough then and was never motivated to do that. After reading about some of the great men that had bad handwriting, any motivation that I had disappeared too. Computers and typing felt like a blessing to me, as I hated writing. However; I have come a long way from those days. It has been such a long time that in have written anything with pen and paper that my handwriting has become pathetic beyond mention. I recently took some notes and I could not bear the ugliness of it. So, to this front, I have decided to write something everyday to a notebook. It is mostly going to be random stuff, but let me see how far it goes. So far, while the writing has become more legible and less painful for the eye, it is has stopped improving beyond that. But then it's only been three days. Maybe I will improve if I do not lose the momentum.

Third thing in my mind is physical exercise. Since my job and my hobbies are all done sitting at one place, the attraction that the earth has to my body has increased quite a bit (I'm talking of gravitational attraction here). I need to do something about this. I found out about an interval training method which requires only seven minutes a day that seems doable, but some people have commented that it is very exhaustive. That was understood from the very fact that it was said to be very effective. What remains to be seen is if I can get to start it.

I follow James Clear who gives excellent advice on habit formation etc. I have found his advice to be very useful in some things I tried. I am hoping that this clubbed with the rest of the tools could help me achieve the results I am aiming for.

Anyone else has any tips and tricks that has worked for them in any of these aspects?

Thursday, January 22, 2015

Well, the eCommerce war in India has really heated up. It is not long back that Snapdeal, Flipkart and Amazon had come with extreme deals to get new customers. The deals at Flipkart brought in so many customers that they could not handle the load on their servers and had to end up releasing an apology. Flipkart took the lead in coming up with exclusive deals with Motorola and Xiaomi, which released some really good mobile phones into the Indian market. Amazon followed up with its deal with OnePlusOne and Yureka, both of which are exclusively available on Amazon. Unfortunately OnePlusOne is invite only and Yureka is a flash sale like Xiaomi. Snapdeal so far has not jumped into this exclusive sale deal, or at least not that I know of.

However, when it comes to having sales, none of them can be left behind. The Republic Day sales is going big on all of them. However, why am I writing this one up? Well, I was looking to buy an external hard drive, and since I own a WD device, I was looking for another one from the same guys. The kind of offers that these guys have on these is amazing. They are offering in the range of 20%, 50% and 40% on these. Flipkart is giving an additional 10% to HDFC Card Holders. Looks like this is going to be another war in which the consumer is going to be the winner.

In the offline world, I hear Big Bazaar and Star Bazaar have really big offerings too. The details are yet to be seen. So, hurry, do your shopping before the 26th of Jan, or before the sale ends as per each of these companies and make the most of these offers.

For now, I am breaking my head over a few WD products. WD MyCloud is something that I am really looking into. The ability to have data at home and access anywhere, and the ability have multiple devices sinc with it is awesome. Also, for the same amount of storage, the amount you will be paying for many of the other public cloud services would add up to much higher in less than a year. This is really tempting, but what I went in looking for is a simple 2 TB External Hard Drive.

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

After resisting for a long time, I have finally decided to buy a touch only phone. I waited in vain for MI3 or MI4 to no avail. I even spent some time trying to get either Redmi S1 or Redmi Note 4G and even Yureka, I have now become disillusioned with the Flash sales. I fail to understand how so many people manage to sit for these sales time and time again. I had enough after just one attempt for each.

Makes me wonder, is this a new marketing strategy to create interest? Anything scarce really does create an interest. If it is cheaper and better than other things equivalent, then no need to even discuss the kind of interest that can gather. I did wish that they come out of the flash sale mode and come with regular availability, but for now, I have to let these go. I am now thinking of buying Moto G2. It is available all the time, is reasonably good in the price, and I also know enough people around who use it and are very happy about it. The RAM is slightly lower for the times and makes me wonder if it will be worth considering the fact that I do not change my phone often. The last time I bought a phone was 4 years ago, so that should say something about it. In the last 10 year I have changed only 4 phones, and two of them was due to damage.

Considering these facts, and the fact that handling a phone delicately is not an option for me (and my toddler who loves phones), is this phone a good option. A good old Nokia 1100 would have been good considering the toddler, but he just loves smartphones.

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